It Won't Always Be Wrong': Morality and Monsters in Legal Rational Authority

8/8/2019 'It Won't Always Be Wrong': Morality and Monsters in Legal Rational Authority

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Article

LAW, CULTURE

AND

THE HUMANITIES

LAW, CULTURE

AND

THE HUMANITIES

Corresponding author:

Sheryl N. Hamilton, Department of Law, Carleton University, 1125Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario,

Canada K1S 5B6.

E-mail: [email protected]

Law, Culture and the Humanities

6(3) 394419 The Author(s) 2010

Reprints and permission: sagepub.

co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1743872110374264http://lch.sagepub.com

It Wont Always Be Wrong:Morality and Monsters in LegalRational Authority

Sheryl N. HamiltonCanada Research Chair in Communication, Law and Governance, Carleton University

Neil GerlachDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University

AbstractHow to govern in the face of radical diversity and seemingly intractable conflict? A key question

after 9/11, it is also central to dark fantasy literature. The literary answer is a return to legal rational

authority, specifically bureaucracy. We examine the novel, Benighted (Kit Whitfield), where the

Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity must manage relations betweenthe dominant lycanthropes and the despised underclass of humans. Developing other attempts to

theorize the monster in relation to bureaucracy, we suggest that within the novel bureaucrats and

the bureau function as hopeful monsters, sites for the ongoing negotiation of morality.

KeywordsLegal rational authority; monster; bureaucracy; dark fantasy; morality.

in answer to your question, I think I have to say, yes. By the standards of my profession,

by the standards of [my] Department my behavior was professional

You really believe that it was fit behavior for a member of a government institution?

DORLAs an odd place, Mr. Franklin

Not that odd, Ms. Galley. Ive noted numerous cases where DORLA operatives were successfully

sued. As I understand it, there are almost monthly demotions within your ranks. Please lets not

pretend DORLA isnt accountable

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Hamilton and Gerlach 395

. That does make us look accountable, doesnt it. those demotions are part of the system.

People do get publicly punished here; its good for the government to make sure it happens. But

theyll never overhaul us. That would be too close to backing us up. Moon nights too insoluble

a problem, and were too good a scapegoat. Its easier to punish us at intervals than to make usproperly accountable

Then God help the country, Ms. Galley, because DORLA is the most unethical, inconsistent,

and unprofessional institution I can imagine.

A typical exchange of pleasantries between two lawyers, Adnan Franklin and Lola

Galley, following the roughing up, while in custody, of their mutual client. Not surpris-

ingly, one lawyer is on private retainer and the other is a public servant. Also predictably

after such an occurrence, the accountability of the public institution is at issue. What

makes the exchange more atypical, however, is that one of the lawyers is a lycanthrope, or

werewolf. The other has a birth defect known as anmorphism, that produces nons or

barebackshumans who have the disability that they cannot lune with each full moon.

Adnan Franklin and Lola Galley live in a society imagined by dark fantasy writer Kit

Whitfield in her novel,Benighted, where 99.6 per cent of the population is lycanthropic

and the remaining 0.4 per cent of citizens is charged with the task of keeping social order

during moon nights. What has resulted is a highly stratified society where lycos are

dominant, and barebacks suffer continual bigotry and institutionalized prejudice.

While most lyco citizens respect state-mandated curfews and engage in voluntary

lock-up on moon nights, some do not. Whether for reasons of vagrancy, youthfulrebellion, or because they are prowlers, some lunes roam the citya danger to property,

to other lunes, and to barebacks. Unable to temper their desires and hungers with reason,

they must be controlled in order to prevent social chaos. And it is the Department for

the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity, or DORLA, that is charged with that

unenviable task. DORLAs operatives (all barebacks of course) take on dog-catching

duty, restraining and capturing rogue lunes so that they can be safely kept in state shelters

until dawn, whereupon they resume their lives in positions of authority. Lola, a legal

advisor with DORLA, recognizes the irony:

They lay down the rules that set us to guarding them from each other every month. We bleed or

die and have to treat them with tender caution because if we hurt them the least little bit when

they try to kill us, the next morning theyll rise from their beds and sue. For this, they call us

names and pay us nothing and let it be known that they despise us.1

Yet as interesting as the dynamics of racism are within the 2006 novel, Benighted, the

story is as, interestingly and less predictably, read as a complex commentary on the place

of legal-rational governance in a post-9/11 world.

In this article, we readBenightedas a site of the contemporary popular representationof legal rationality and bureaucracy, with particular emphasis on the moral possibilities

of the monster. This novel is not the only such cultural resource. As we discuss in greater

1. Kit Whitfield, Benighted(New York: Del Rey, 2006), pp. 50-1.



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396 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

detail below, there are a number of locations where law and bureaucracy have been

characterized as monstrous in recent years: popular culture, academic writing, manage-

ment trade literature, and the media. In each of these forms of narrative, bureaucracy and

law have been critiqued because they supposedly do not respond to the needs and desiresof late modern or postmodern citizens. They are inefficient, amoral, and even immoral,

more concerned with maintaining procedure than with producing just outcomes. The

resulting injustices and the organizations unaccountable power render these bureaucra-

cies monstrous. And yet, we argue that dark fantasy writing requires us to think again

about the potential of the monster in forms of legal rational authority.

In recent years, dark fantasy has been an extremely popular and profitable genre

with bestselling novels and films such as Phillip Pullmans His Dark Materials tril-

ogy, Laurell K. Hamiltons Anita Blake series, Kim Harrisons Rachel Morgan series,

Dark City (1998), Sergei Lukyanenkos trilogyNight Watch (2006),Day Watch (2007),

and Twilight Watch (2007), Underworld(2003), and even J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter

stories.2 Dark fantasy is a genre within the larger category of what we are calling the

literature of the fantastic. The literature of the fantastic is distinguished by self-coher-

ent narratives which, when set in our current reality, tell a story impossible in the world

as we know it, but when set in an other world or future world is possible in the terms

of that world.3 Generally, it is divided into three genres including science fiction, fan-

tasy, and horror. Science fiction draws upon the imaginative perspectives of modern

science, attempting to locate itself in the real universe and present fantastic develop-

ments explicable in terms of the scientific worldview. Fantasy is usually set in imagi-

nary worlds where the modern scientific worldview is substituted by magical and othernon-rational perspectives and forces and horror involves the appearance of a super-

natural force into the everyday world, which is horrific because it cannot be explained

in the rational terms of modern science. Dark fantasy typically combines elements of

both fantasy and horror.

Of all the genres of the literature of the fantastic, dark fantasy must necessarily, given

its premises, deal with questions of how to organize and regulate the social field within

a world in which humans co-exist with fantastical creatures such as vampires, were-

wolves, zombies, witches, wizards, and so on. These works combine the ever-looming

possibility of fantastical intergroup conflict, with the inherent weakness of the human

2. Philip Pullmans series began with The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey, 1997), which

was followed by The Subtle Knife (1998) and The Amber Spyglass (2001). The Golden Compass

was released as a film in 2007. Laurell K. Hamiltons series featuring necromancer Anita

Blake, began in 1994 with Guilty Pleasures (New York: Ace) and has continued with 15 other

titles. See Hamiltons website at: www.laurellkhamilton.org. Kim Harrisons witch-for-hire,

Rachel Morgan, began in 2004 with Dead Witch Walking(Toronto: HarperCollins Canada).

Also in the series are: The Good, the Bad, and the Undead(2005),Every Which Way but Dead

(2005),A Fistful of Charms (2006),For a Few Demons More (2007), The Outlaw Demon

Wails (2008). Sergei Lukyanenkos series has been translated from Russian as The Night

Watch (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2006), The Day Watch (2007), The Twilight Watch (2007)

and The Last Watch (2008). The first two books have been made into films. J.K. Rowlings

fifth book in the Harry Potter series,Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Vancouver:

Raincoast Books, 2004) focuses, in particular, on the Ministry of Magic.

3. John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (London: Orbit, 1999) at viii.



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being, all set in a world and time that looks almostlike our own. They thus enable the

examination of a central issue of late modernity: the potential for society to degenerate

into a Hobbesian state of nature, a literal feeding frenzy, if means are not found to

enforce social order and maintain the necessary boundaries that allow for peaceful co-existence. These worlds are peopled by monsters; difference is literalized at a species

level, with resulting hostilities and power imbalances between groups. In this setting,

the question arises of how to maintain social order in such a radically pluralistic society?

Many of these narratives offer up bureaucratized social forms as the potential mecha-

nism to resolve these tensions, not unlike their political philosopher predecessors. They

do not, however, do so uncritically. Another set of questions must then be posed. When

everyone is a monster, can the legal-rational logic of bureaucracy and law produce moral

outcomes? Can those entrusted to enforce the law maintain a moral stance in the face of

the amoralizing effects of bureaucratic operation?

Benighted, more directly and complexly than much other dark fantasy, explicitly

interrogates issues of morality, legal rationality, bureaucracy, and monstrousness, forcing

us to complexify the ways we understand their interaction. This complexity is mobilized

specifically, we suggest, through the figure of the monster of and within the post 9/11

bureau. In order to read it as a monstrous bureaucracy narrative, we first situate the figure

of the monster as a theoretical construct with scholarship in the social sciences and

humanities. We then examine how legal studies and organization studies have each taken

up the monster as a way to interrogate the workings of the bureau. Finally, we consider

the novel, expanding upon and developing Paul du Gays interpretation of Haraways

hopeful monster as a means to take account of contradiction and paradox inherent inour always tenuous social contract.4 In keeping with the position of the novel, we argue

that the post-9/11 bureaucracy is a complex social site, productive of an ethical ethos that

should neither be removed from its broader social context, nor easily dismissed.

I. Monster Theory

Although, as Donna Haraway claims, [m]onsters have always defined the limits of

community in Western imaginations,5 increasingly as social complexity demands that

we take account of a world of mutable borders, recognize our hybrid subjectivity, andconsider non-redemptive politics, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have

returned to the figure of the monster.6 Arguably, this most recent phase of monster

4. Paul du Gay, Colossal Immodesties and Hopeful Monsters: Pluralism and Organizational

Conduct, Organization 1.1 (1994), pp. 12548.

5. Donna J. Haraway, The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d

Others, Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Jenny

Wolmark, ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 31466, 191.

6. We recognize that the monster has a long pedigree in theorizing boundaries; however, wesuggest that from the 1980s onwards, we are in a new phase of this trend. For interesting

discussions of the monster as a boundary-figure see Elaine L. Graham, Representations of

the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 2002), Edward Ingebretsen,At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in

Public Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), Margrit Shildrick,Embodying

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theory was inaugurated by Haraways archetypical cyborg,7but has continued to mutate

since that time. Actor Network Theory (ANT), with its focus on breaking down the

binaries that we normally employ to delimit boundaries between people and the things

with which they interact, has been at the forefront of recent attempts to define monsters.

8

Generally, ANT takes the approach that they are entities who disrupt boundaries by

inhabiting margins and peripheries. Monsters are beings, objects, and ideas that live on

the edges of law and bureaucracy, often hybrids of that which is included and that which

is excluded, the sacred and the profane. As such, they disrupt established categories for

organizing how people relate to one another.

John Laws collection, A Sociology of Monsters, is a groundbreaking work in this

tradition.9 Law argues we are all monsters as he defines themheterogeneous entities

that are products of the sociotechnical relation between humans and machinesbut that

some monsters are so privileged that they do not appear to be monstrous. Therefore, a

sociology of monsters should investigate sources of privilege, as well as the pains of

stigmatization and marginalization. Jeffrey Cohen makes a similar argument in his intro-

duction toMonster Theory: Reading Culture, but suggests that the monster is not tied to

sociotechnical relations, but rather is a cultural product that lives on the borders of cul-

tural categories. The monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a

breaker of category, and a resistant Other known only through process and movement,

never through dissection-table analysis.10 Others working with ANT have a narrower

definition of monsters, characterizing them as strictly marginal and outcastthe

embodiment of that which is exiled from the self.11 The monstrous self, which is impure

and hybrid, is very different from the privileged self who occupies more traditional his-tories of social, economic, and technological location.12

the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002), David Williams,

Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature

(Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996), Kirk J. Schneider, Hor-

ror and the Holy: Wisdom-teachings of the Monster (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), David

D. Gilmore,Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth,

Power and Popular Culture (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), and Richard

Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2003).

7. Donna Haraway, Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the

1980s, Socialist Review 80 (1985), pp. 65104.

8. For an introduction to Actor Network Theory see John Law and John Hassard, eds.,Actor

Network Theory and After(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the

Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

9. John Law, ed., A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination

(New York: Routledge, 1991).

10. Jeffrey J. Cohen, Monster Culture (Seven Theses) in Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed.,Monster Theory:

Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 325.

11. Susan Leigh Star, Power, Technologies and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being

Allergic to Onions in John Law, ed.,A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology

and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 54.

12. Ibid.



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The monstrous is often also defined as that which is out of place. Mary Douglas, for

example, examines the concept of displacement as intimately related to pollution.13 Dirt

is natural and necessary in a garden, but it is a pollutant in the living room and must be

removed. Social organization produces itself through such exclusions; the concept ofdirt presupposes organization since displacement requires boundaries. Objects, events,

and ideas are perceived as anomalous, monstrous, and impure to the extent to which they

violate boundaries around which social organization is constituted.14 Michel Foucault

takes a similar view of the monstrous, but focuses on the organization of knowledge as

the basis of its definition.15 He argues that it is a disruption of institutionalized knowing.

Each disciplinary field has an ability to determine true from false propositions based on

the banishment of other ways of knowing. The monstrous is that which lies beyond the

outer limits of legitimate knowledge, expelled by the normalizing judgments of a given

episteme.16 In other words, the monstrous is the banished Other of orderly knowing. It

must be refused and contained by a given organization of truth.

The gender of the monster has been a relevant element for many monster theorists;

however, it was Barbara Creed, building upon psychoanalytic theory in general and the

idea of Julia Kristeva, more specifically, who proferred the concept of the monstrous-

feminine to analyze the representation and abjection of women within horror film.17 She

focuses on the doubled identity of the woman/monster. The horror of the mother is found

in her holding of the powers of life and death, her simultaneous representation of discon-

tinuity and reproduction, and of the two-fold desire for differentiation from her and to

return to the state of original oneness with the mother.18 She argues that in addition to

the archaic mother, there are a number of archetypical monstrous-feminine figures: thevampire, the witch, the monstrous womb, and the possessed woman. While encounters

with any of these women contains elements specific to that instanciation, all bring about

a confrontation with the abject in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the

boundaries between the human and non-human.19

There are other scholars, like Creed, who focus on the way that monstrousness produces

and reinforces social norms and hierarchies, although not only those which are gendered.

Ren Girard suggests that practices of victimization of individuals and groups engender a

sense of solidarity among those who are being persecuted or Othered.20 He conflates mon-

sters and scapegoats and argues that their ritual extermination serves the purpose of

13. Mary Douglas,Purity and Danger(London: Routledge, 1966).

14. Brian Bloomfield and Theo Vurdubakis, The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor Networks and

the Writing of Displacement, Organization 6.4 (1999), pp. 62547, 627.

15. Michel Foucault, Orders of Discourse, Social Science Information 10.2 (1971), pp. 730.

16. Ibid., at16.

17. Barbara Creed, Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection, Screen,

1986: 4570 and The Monstrous -Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York:

Routledge, 1993).18. Ibid., 1986 at 64.

19. Ibid. at 53.

20. Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1977) and The Scapegoat(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).



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strengthening the dominant group and the social fabric.21 Mark Ingebretsen argues, on the

other hand, that scapegoats and monsters are not completely interchangeable, because the

monster hints at an allure and desire for which scapegoating does not completely account.22

Monsters, then, for our purposes, are hybrid, heterogeneous subjects, objects, andknowledges that straddle the boundaries between organization and disorganization,

legality and illegality, human and technology, and threaten the closure of social order. Yet

at the same time that we fear the monster and seek to control it, we also are fascinated

with it and what it might mean. In other words, the monster polices the boundaries of

the possible.23

And yet there are different types of monster. Drawing upon fiction of the fantastic,

Brian Bloomfield and Theo Vurdubakis (1999) offer a useful three-part typology for nar-

rating the monstrous.24 First, they suggest that monstrosity functions as a distorted mir-

ror. In this form of narrative, the monstrous is essentially human with some attributes

lacking and others possessed to a greater extent than normal. It is the fantastical equiva-

lent of Edward Saids Orientalism. For example, the title creature of the filmAlien (1979)

is a mirror of the relentless and voracious forms of organization that have come to domi-

nate capitalist societies, just as the android-like humans of Philip K. Dicks stories reflect

the legal-rational subjectivity of modernity.25 Second, monstrosity operates as subver-

sion. The monster represents a break in the natural order, characterizing that which lies

outside of dominant value systems. It inhabits the unsaid and unseen of culturethat

which has been silenced and made invisible. The beleaguered humans of both Logans

Run (1976) and the originalPlanet of the Apes film (1968), for example, represent this

sort of challenge to the social and epistemological order of their societies. Third, themonster is undecidability. In this narrative frame, no resolution is offered. Events in the

narrative could be the result of aliens or the imaginings of a troubled mind, the work of

a vampire or simply a devious criminal. Many episodes of the television series The

X-Files revolve around this sort of ambiguity as both paranormal and scientific explana-

tions are provided for the monstrous phenomena under investigation. We suggest that the

cult film,Donny Darko (2001) is another good example of monster as undecidability.26

The novelBenightedis the first-person narrative of Lola Galley, a non living within

a society in which she belongs to a very small minority. At the level of embodiment, she

is monstrous, and in many ways is treated as such. However, in this world, the nonsperform the important function of policing lycos on moon nights and consequently have

21. See the discussion in Kearney, Supra, note 6 at 37 and Marc Neocleous, The Monstrous and

the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), at 42.

22. Ingebretsen, Supra, note 6 at 67.

23. Supra, note 10 at 12.

24. Supra, note 14.

25. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (New York: Del Rey, 1996), The

Simulacra (New York: Vintage, 2002), The Penultimate Truth (New York: Vintage, 2004).

26. Bloomfield and Vurdubakis third classification coheres with a trend in the literature of thefantastic labeled as the weird. Dating back to pulp fiction tales of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark

Ashton Smith and other fantasists of the first decades of the 20th century, it carries on today

in a new trend provocatively called the new weird by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, eds., The

New Weird(San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008).



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considerable, albeit sporadically accessible, power. They inhabit a central position within

the legal order and produce a paradox: a despised minority has power over a prejudiced

majority. This is monstrousness as subversionthe presence of nons in a position of

power is a constant irritant to lycos and subverts their sense of the natural order of things.The novels tensions emerge from this paradox. For the reader, another form of subver-

sion occurs. Lola is, like the readers of the novel, a non-lycanthrope. However, she is

monstrous within that society and the reader experiences that monstrousness and the

prejudices it wreaks upon her. In this way, the novel is a successful evocation of the

experience of belonging to a minority victimized by prejudice.

While there is much to explore in the novel around themes of prejudice, its emotional

impacts, and its effects on subjectivity, we are focusing on another level of monstrousness,

that related to representations of legal rationality. At this level, Benightedemploys mon-

strousness as a distorted mirror to examine questions of morality within rule of law and its

offspring, bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a law-based form of administration premised on the

idea that administrative decision-making should be subject to rules which are enforced by

a hierarchical system of overview that allows for legal recourse in situations where the

rules have not been followed. Bureaucracy adheres to, and gains legitimacy from legal-

rational authority, as opposed to either traditional or charismatic authority.27 It seems a

laudable basis for the governance of social institutions, but has always been subject to criti-

cism and ridicule. This is particularly the case in late modernity where the idea of post-

bureaucracy has taken hold of the managerial imagination and organizations of all types

claim to be in a process of de-bureaucratizing through downsizing, flattening hierarchies,

becoming more customer focused, and encouraging more entrepreneurial initiative fromemployees.28 There are a number of critiques leveled at legal-rational organization, but one

of the most sustained and damning is the claim that it fosters amorality and even immoral-

ity in the name of efficiency and the achievement of organizational goals.

II. Fictional Monsters in Law and Organization

The critique of bureaucracy as immoral or monstrous appears not only in management

discourse, but also, as we have noted, in popular culture, where representations of

bureaucracies focus on the more intense and dynamic consequences of legal-rationalorganization in terms of sex, violence, emotion, power struggle, the personal conse-

quences of success and failure, and disorganization.29 Of all the genres of the fantastic,

science fiction, in particular, has been recognized as a rich site by a growing number of

legal and organization scholars concerned with late-modern legal rational authority.

27. For a discussion of the three types of authority see Max Weber, The Three types of Legiti-

mate Rule in Amitai Etzioni, ed. Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader(New York:

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961), pp. 414.

28. See, for example, Charles Heckscher and Anne Donnellon, eds., The Post-Bureaucratic

Organization: New Perspectives on Organizational Change (London: Sage, 1994).

29. John Hassard and Ruth Holliday, Introduction in John Hassard and Ruth Holliday, eds.

OrganizationRepresentation: Work and Organizations in Popular Culture (London: Sage,

1998), pp. 115: 1.



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Recently, Law, Culture and the Humanities published a special issue on Galactic

Jurisprudence30 while the journal Organization in 1999 published a special issue on

science fiction.31 There have been other works, particularly in organization studies, that

deal with science fiction themes as they relate to narratives of organization.

32

We suggest four key themes emerge from this literature that, in varying ways, deal

with issues of the monstrous. Much of the commentary on science fiction in organization

and legal studies focuses on questions of our relationship to science and technology, often

representing it in dystopic terms. As Kieran Tranter and Bronwyn Statham point out in

their discussion of the film Star Trek: Nemesis, the monster in question is the clone and

the reaction of characters to clones parallels the hysteria that often accompanies policy

decision-making around cloning.33 The film offers a circumscribed critique of the genetic

determinism that underlies this fear and the authors argue that it is the hysteria that should

be the object of fear, not clones themselves. Bloomfield makes similar claims about the

prospects of artificial intelligence as represented in Stanley Kubriks 2001 A Space

Odyssey.34 The computer HAL in the film has become a cultural icon of the monstrous

consequences of technological development and its impacts on social organization.

More directly relevant to our own inquiry, a second and related theme in the litera-

ture explores the ambiguity of science fictional representations in terms of scientific

30. See Volume 3(3), 2007.

31. See Volume 6(4), 1999.

32. See Brian Bloomfield, Narrating the Future of Intelligent Machines: The Role of Science

Fiction in Technological Anticipation in Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi,

eds., Narratives We Organize By (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company,

2003), pp. 193212, J. Martin Corbett, Sublime Technologies and Future Organization

in Science Fiction Film, 197095 in John Hassard and Ruth Holliday, eds., Organization

Representation: Work and Organizations in Popular Culture (London: Sage, 1998),

pp. 24758, Neil Gerlach and Sheryl N. Hamilton, Telling the Future, Managing the Pres-

ent: Business Management Writing as SF, Science Fiction Studies 27.3 (2000), pp. 46177,

David Metz, From Lancelot to Count Zero. Tracking Knights, Cyber-punks and Nerds in

Identity Narratives of Freelancers in the IT-Field in Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale

Gagliardi, eds.,Narratives We Organize By (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Com-

pany, 2003), pp. 17391, Martin Parker and Robert Cooper, Cyborganisation: Cinema asNervous System in John Hassard and Ruth Holliday, eds., OrganizationRepresentation:

Work and Organizations in Popular Culture (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 20128, Warren

Smith, Computers and Representation: Organization in the Virtual World in John Hassard

and Ruth Holliday, eds., Organization Representation: Work and Organizations in Popular

Culture (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 22945. Other fiction genres that have received some

attention include detective fiction (Gerardo Patriotta, Detective Stories and the Narrative

Structure of Organizing: Towards an Understanding of Organization as Texts, in Barbara

Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi, eds.,Narratives We Organize By (Amsterdam: John

Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003), pp. 14970; Jerome H. Delameter and Ruth Prigozy,

eds., The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1998)). These are products of a turn toward cultural studies and narrative analysis

in organizational and legal studies.

33. Kieran Tranter and Bronwyn Statham, Echo and Mirror: Clone Hysteria, Genetic Determin-

ism and Star Trek Nemesis,Law, Culture and the Humanities 3(3) (2007), pp. 36180.

34. Bloomfield,supra, note 32.



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knowledge and its ability to provide an effective means of understanding human nature

and the world around us. As a rational knowledge form, it may be ineffective in address-

ing the dialectic between rationality and non-rationality in human nature. Sage Leslie-

McCarthy explores Isaac Asimovs robot stories to argue that they challenge currentnotions of justice based on the formalistic application of law.35 In a diverse society, rep-

resented in the stories by the presence of both human and artificial intelligences, law

cannot be premised on a notion of nominal equality because the society represented in

the stories is basically a slave society. Instead, anticipating a posthuman future, the law

must be based on a notion of the fundamental kinship of intelligent beings. Law must be

read interpretively, not literally. It is not static, but is a many-layered, evolving entity that

cannot be contained within precise definitions. As societies become more complex, so

too must the law.

In organization studies, such concerns center on the idea of management science.

Also drawing upon Asimovs workhis Foundation seriesNelson Phillips and Stelios

Zyglidopolous make an argument about the limits of management science within a plu-

ral society.36 In the novels, Asimov portrays a future society premised on psychohis-

tory a synthesis of psychology, history, sociology, and other disciplines that together

render the human future transparent and predictable. This is the holy grail of manage-

ment science, but inevitably problems arise in the novels from observer effect, scale

differences, unpredictable innovations, and the development of mutations among the

human species.

A third important theme in the study of science fiction, law and organization includes

a fear of the movement toward ever greater technical rationalization and managementauthority in organizations and a corresponding fear of a loss of rationality in law. J. Gould

analyzes the filmAlien as a contest between two superorganisms that are both victors in

the evolutionary strugglethe alien creature and the multinational corporation attempting

to capture it.37 The human characters are simply components of the rampant corporation

that dominates their lives. Similarly, in law, Peter J. Hutchings reads the film Blade

Runnerthrough a post 9/11 lens to ask what sort of legal rationality is at work in a society

in which a central power is busy taming other worlds, where the Other (replicants) is

restricted to offworld zones, and where people (Blade Runners) are hired to execute them

if they wander into the central zone, i.e. crossing the boundary.38 He argues that ulti-mately, the theory of right represented inBlade Runneris the right of the outlaw because

right is subjected to power in which state law undoes and exceeds its own foundations.

Here it is the state that becomes a monster. In a related way, Jason Bainbridge examines

the postmodern superhero in comics and finds that this figure exists in opposition to

35. Sage Leslie-McCarthy, Asimovs Posthuman Pharisees: The Letter of the Law Versus the

Spirit of the Law in Isaac Asimovs Robot Novels, Law, Culture and the Humanities 3(3)

(2007), 398415.

36. Nelson Phillips and Stelios Zyglidopoulos, Learning From Foundation: Asimovs Psycho-history and the Limits of Organization Theory, Organization 6.4 (1999), pp. 591608.

37. J. Gould, The Destruction of the Social by the Organic inAlien, Science Fiction Studies 7.3

(1980).

38. Peter J. Hutchings, From Offworld Colonies to Migration Zones: Blade Runnerand the

Fractured Subject of Jurisprudence,Law, Culture and the Humanities 3(3) (2007), 38197.



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legal-rationality and is legitimated by supplementing the failures of the law.39 Superheroes

reflect the tension between a modern adherence to the rule of law and a pre- or post-

modern notion of transcendent justice.

Finally, a fourth important theme in the treatment of fiction within both legal andorganizational analyses is the question of morality. Many of the articles cited above

deal with this theme implicitly. Hutchings is exploring the morality of a state turning

away from its own legal principles. Leslie-McCarthy analyzes the moral implications

of maintaining highly restrictive borders around legal definitions of who has legal

rights within an increasingly complex and diverse society. Nidhi Srinivas explores

morality expressly by arguing that Philip K. Dicks work takes on the theme of what he

termed androidization versus moral agency.40 Androidization refers to a situation in

which an individual is reduced to a manipulable instrument, focused on goals chosen by

others, with a corresponding moral indifference to the outcomes. This stands in opposi-

tion to the duty to maintain ones moral agency as Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt,

and others have argued (and as we will discuss below).41

Thus, generally in legal and organization studiesthe two academic fields most con-

cerned with the problematic of late-modern bureaucracywe see important themes of

bureaucracy as monster, the political challenges of pluralism, the limits of an inflexible

legal regime, and the loss of morality seemingly inherent to bureaucratization. Yet at the

same time, there is a latent lament in much of this literature for better law assuming

that this is both desirable and possible. The diversity represented still falls on a continuum

measured by reason and the monster works as a negative construct, rather than a source

of alternative conceptualization, as the theorists of the monster call for.Interestingly, despite the fact it is one of the worlds major literary growth sectors

and its stories have been made into commercially and critically successful films, dark

fantasy has received little attention from scholars of law and organization.42 Dark fan-

tasy has been defined in different ways as a synonym for gothic fantasy43 and as an

emotional reaction, a sense of creeping horror, provoked by literature.44 More usefully,

John Clute and John Grant distinguish it by the way in which its settings are often a

combination of our known world and a fantastical world of horror, and also by its

39. Jason Bainbridge, This is The Authority. This Planet is Under Our Protection An Exege-

sis of Superheroes Interrogations of Law, Law, Culture and the Humanities 3(3) (2007),

45576.

40. Nidhi Srinivas, Managers as Androids: Reading Moral Agency in Philip Dick, Organiza-

tion 6.4 (1999), pp. 60924.

41. For example, see Hannah Arendt,Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

(New York: Penguin, 1994).

42. Dieter Riemenschneider, Global Fantasy Glocal Imagination, Journal of Postcolonial

Writing41.1 (2005), pp.1425, at 14. Literary studies has neglected the study of fantasy writing

or has addressed it simply in terms of postcolonial studies, generally regarding it as the incur-sion of precolonial mythical consciousness forcing its way into the realist storytelling mode.

43. Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy (Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 1986).

44. Chris Morgan, ed.,Dark Fantasies (London: Time Warner Books UK, 1989).



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refusal to conclude on a hopeful transcendent note.45 It is this combination of necessary

boundary play, of colliding worlds, and of a non-transcendental narrative which makes

dark fantasy literature a particularly rich source for the consideration of the bureau-

cratic form. Often dark fantasy literalizes a master figure that has come to characterizelaw and bureaucracy in recent yearsthe figure of the monsterand yet issues of who

is or is not a monster are not necessarily mediated through science and technology, as

it often is in science fiction. Recognizing that social actors are often mutually mon-

strous to one another and that the social fabric is always fragile, makes dark fantasy

less prone to moralize. Instead, it offers, we suggest, the potential for Donna Haraways

hopeful monster.

Haraway, building upon her earlier work on cyborgs and the potential of speculative

fiction, argues for a monstrous politics, a non-transcendent politics of pluralism. She

asserts that what we are calling the literature of the fantastic is a site in and through

which we can analyze the promise of monsters.

Science fiction is generically concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries between

problematic selves and unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in a

context structured by transnational technoscience. The emerging social subjects called

inappropriate/d others inhabit such worlds. SFscience fiction, speculative futures, science

fantasy, speculative fictionis an especially apt sign under which to conduct an inquiry into the

artifactual as a reproductive technology that might issue in something other than the sacred

image of the same, something inappropriate, unfitting, and so, maybe, inappropriated.46

Borrowing from Haraway, Paul du Gay, writing in the field of organization studies and

contrary to other bureaucracy critics, suggests that such monsters may exist within the

boundaries of legitimate organization and law. He diagnoses two kinds of monsters.

Immodest monsters, who inhabit the centers of society and who desire a coherent, stable,

unified identity are engaged, he argues, in a colossally immodest ambition rooted in the

silencing of other voices.47 He rejects this monstrous search for a centred identity at all

costs in favor of a second type of monstrousnesshybridity, impurity, discordance, and

overlapswhich he terms hopeful monsters.48 In this sense, he argues, we are all mon-

sters in the sense of being heterogeneous collages, the products of several interlockinghistories and cultures that can never be permanently unified. Within a pluralistic society,

different realms of life must be governed by different values in order to minimize the

inevitable conflicts that arise within a heterogeneous, diverse society. It is in the hopeful

monster, we suggest, that the possibilities for ethical bureaucracy exist and despite its

bleak narrative, we argue that Whitfields novel demonstrates how its protagonist Lola

negotiates the tensions and complexities of being a hopeful monster, and suggests that

bureaucracy itself can be simultaneously monstrous and hopeful.




48. Ibid.



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III. A Bureaucracy of Monsters and Monstrous Bureaucracy:

Considering Benighted

The world ofBenightedis parallel to our own in most ways, including its modern pro-cesses of social control. In a passage that parallels Foucaults opening toDiscipline and

Punish, Lola reflects upon the history of attempts to control luning.49 In medieval and

early modern times, those who were caught luning were accused of witchcraft and suf-

fered corporal punishment in the form of torture and burning at the stake: witches

were declaring their wicked deeds on every rack in the continent. It was a legalistic

process, the witch hunt, there were degrees of torment imposed in regular sequence and

forms of confession to be gone through, and it worked with an efficiency that seemed

like divine justice.50 However, over time, a more reasoned approach took over and the

Catholic Church began to recruit nons as an order of guards empowered to enforce

curfews, inspect peoples lockups, bear witness at trials, and generally provide a regular

application of consistent laws. The result was a rationalization and bureaucratization of

the treatment of lunes as the Age of Reason approached. As in Foucaults world, how-

ever, the problem remains of how to manage those who cannot or will not submit to

disciplinary powerthe ones who cannot be entirely tamed. The answeroffered both by

the modern state and Whitfieldis the use of reasonable force according to a set of laws

and bureaucratic rules.

The bureau is the organizational form which has emerged to address the administra-

tive needs of the modern nation state governed by rational-legal authority and Max

Weber is its foremost analyst.51 Contrary to some of the popular characterizations of hisideas, Weber was not completely critical of bureaucracy. Indeed, he suggested it was the

best way to create efficient, flexible, and competent regulation under the rule of law. To

accomplish this, however, the bureau is ideally characterized by a series of specific

characteristics.

First, bureaux should reflect the continuous organization of official functions and be

bound by rules, both procedural and substantive. In other words, we expect the Passport

Office to be open five days a week for a fixed number of hours each day and to operate

in a predictable way, not on the whims of the individual employees or managers. Second,

bureaux are defined by task specialization and bureaucrats have legally defined powersto carry out those tasks. Further, the authority that officials hold over citizens is limited:

taxation officers can audit or fine taxpayers, but they cannot take away their drivers

licenses. Third, the organization of the bureau is hierarchical, following principles of

super- and sub-ordination. Each lower office is under the control of a higher one. This

structure also includes an appeal of grievances from lower to higher offices. Fourth,

officials have technical training that qualifies them to be part of the administrative staff,

usually certified by public examination. Fifth, in the ideal bureau, there is a separation of

49. Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).50. Supra, note 1, at 27.

51. Max Weber,A Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964);

see also Weber,supra note 19, and Max Weber,Economy and Society (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1978).



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members of the administrative staff and ownership of the means of production. The tools

of work are provided to employees and are not their personal property to be used for

personal purposes. Finally, all acts, decisions and rules are recorded in writing by

officials for both future reference purposes and for use as evidence in complaints.The outcome of these ideal attributes is decisions that are objective and procedurally

focused, treating citizens equally regardless of their position within society, relying for

legitimacy upon expert knowledge, and never arbitrary or motivated by personal reasons.

The official, then, is one who accepts the hierarchy of the bureau, strictly adheres to

procedure, distances herself from her personal moral beliefs and attributes, and commits

to the goals and objectives of the office. The office becomes a vocation. The impersonality

of both decision-making and maker is an improvement, Weber posits, over the previous

system of patronage and personal favouritism.

The Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity operates

according to a number of the maxims of the ideal bureaucracy, working to operationalize

rational-legal authority. All citizens born anmorphic are conscripted into DORLA because

of the scope and unrelenting nature of the challenge to social order. As Lola notes,

Theres a choice of what you can do within it, but no question, ever, of not working for

them. Its too big a job, and being non-lyco is too rare a birth defect .52 At various

points, Lola describes her work as a profession and a vocation. She received two

years of legal training to prepare her for her work, and while her legal education is not

as extensive as that of lyco lawyers, her education was supplemented with classes in

administration, animal training, and marksmanship.53 Lolas work practices are governed

by rules and procedures. When apprehending lunes on moon nights, DORLA catchersare to use their collar first, with their tranquilizer guns as a last resort. They also carry

guns with silver bullets, but are not supposed to use them at all. They are subject to sanction

in the event that they do not follow these procedures and these processes are tied directly

to the appearance of accountability and fairness. Lola tells readers, [e]very disciplinary

board meeting somebody gets punished, just to show people like Franklin were answer-

able, some of the time.54 At DORLA, this is called getting strawed, a reference to

short-strawed.55

In addition to its internal procedures and regulations, DORLA, given the nature of its

work, is governed by laws as well. Theyre old, our laws, theyve bent and twistedunder the weight of history, and nobody but us studies them much.56 We see the indi-

vidual hierarchy within the organization in that Lola is a senior catcher and has a trainee,

Marty. As well, she regularly reports to her boss, Hugo, a fair man, but one who shows

absolutely no emotion in the disposition of his jobWebers ideal official. We later meet

Hugos superiors as well when they must intervene in a case. Finally, Lola is part of a

regime of report-writing and faces the difficulty of translating her experiences of being

attacked by a pack, almost having her throat ripped out by a lune citizen in wolf form,

52. Supra, note 1, at 9.53. Supra, note 1, at 26.

54. Supra, note 1, at 71.

55. Ibid.




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and her trainee panicking and shooting a lune in the leg with a silver bullet in order to

save his own life, into the bureaucratic, impersonal language of her workplace.

Yet, while placing a bureaucratic organization at the center of the novel, the narrative

neither blithely recuperates, nor simply condemns, bureaucracy. Rather, it makes visible,we suggest, the complexities of bureaucratic ethics within certain types of bureaucracy.

When two DORLA employees, friends of Lolas, are shot with silver bullets, and she

must find their killers, we learn more about how DORLA actually operates and Lola

experiences an ongoing ethical crisis as she negotiates the boundaries of her work, her

position in society, and her own conscience. Lolas bureaucratic demeanor is inadequate

to the tasks that she faces.

Of course it is not only bureaucrats themselves who question the functioning and role

of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is an easy target. For at least the last thirty years, we have

been experiencing what Herbert Kaufman called the raging pandemic of anti-bureaucratic

sentiment stemming from frustrated citizens and government inquiries, neoliberal man-

agement gurus, and humanist academics.57 And yet Whitfields novel does not sugar coat

the bureaus limitations drawing out Franklins concerns stated in the opening quotation

that DORLA is inconsistent and unprofessional, and contemplating what many critics,

from the political right and left, have argued: that the bureaucratic form itself, is unethical,

is monstrous.

There are a number of critiques of bureaucracy that have emerged over the past few

decades. Robert Parker outlines the popular criticism as consisting of two images of the

bureaucrat: one has this creature endlessly drafting diabolical regulations, cunningly

contriving new controls over the private citizen while extending its own malign influ-ence. The other has bureaucrats positioned as idle loafers .58 Not unrelated to popular

perceptions, the most consistent attack on bureaucracy has come from management writ-

ers who, since the late 1970s, have advocated a post-bureaucratic shift in the management

of organizations in all sectors.59 This critique corresponded to the rise of neo-liberalism in

the political sphere and shares many of its assumptions about deregulation and individual

responsibilization. From the post-bureaucratic perspective, bureaucracies are bloated hier-

archies more focused on their internal processes than on meeting the needs of clients,

customers, and citizens. Consequently, they become uncompetitive and inefficient. Their

chains of command and adherence to rules render them unable to learn from changingconditions in their environments and they are, therefore, unable to adapt to the constant

and rapid market and political changes that characterize late modernity. In order to be

more effective, these writers advocate that organizations flatten their hierarchies, open

themselves up to customer influence, and re-engineer their labor processes to allow

employees to exercise initiative, energy, independence, self-reliance, and a willingness to

take risksthe opposite of how management gurus view the character of the bureaucrat. It

57. Herbert Kaufman, Fear of Bureaucracy: A Raging Pandemic?Public Administration Review

41.1 (1981), pp. 19, at 1.58. Robert Parker, The Administrative Vocation (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1993), pp. 534.

59. See, for example, William Ouchi, Theory Z (New York: Avon, 1982), Thomas Peters and

Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New York: Warner, 1984), and Richard Tanner

Pascale and Anthony Athos, The Art of Japanese Management(New York: Warner, 1982).



16/26


is not only organizational structures and tasks that must change, but also the identity and

subjectivity of the employee.60

A third critique, most pertinent to our analysis, characterizes bureaucracies as inher-

ently unethical because they separate reason and instrumental rationality from emotion,pleasure, and other dispositions that produce a whole moral individual. Consequently,

bureaucrats become soulless occupants of an iron cage of rationality.61Benightedplays

with all three criticisms of bureaucracy to some extent, but its primary concern is the

ethical critique. At the level of bureaucratic subjectivity, the novel is a contemplation of

the ethical considerations of bureaucrats operating in a highly problematic context.

Indeed, when we see that DORLA takes care of its own, that it operates as a world

unto itself, that lyco citizens can disappear into its underground cells for weeks at a time,

subjected to physical abuse to secure information or confessions, and that officials seem

to regularly engage in a form of reverse racist revenge on lyco prisoners, it is difficult

not to be sympathetic to Zygmunt Baumans claim that bureaucracy functions as a

moral sleeping pill.62

Bauman suggests that bureaucracy, in distancing human subjects from each other,

serves to dehumanize the objects of bureaucratic operation. Those objects can then be

expressed in purely technical, ethically neutral terms.63 InModernity and the Holocaust,

Bauman argues that one of the functions of bureaucratic organization in modern society

is to constrict peoples moral nature.64 Consequently, the Holocaust was not an aberration,

but rather a culmination of the guiding spirit of our civilization and its priorities. Normal,

civilized people, who worked in bureaucratic organizations and enforced the law, paved

the way for the Holocaust while sitting at their desks.This outcome could occur, according to Bauman, because of the form of subjectivity

that bureaucracy imposes on people. For Bauman, bureaucrats, unlike Lola, are not

reflective and are not interested in debating the goals of the organization; instead, they

narrowly focus on the task at hand. They accept that the significance of the job is not

related to the person who carries it out, but rather to the importance that others place on

it. They see the world as a set of problems that are soluble in a rational and scientific

way. They despise unpredictability, spontaneity, and chance. They refrain from personal

opinion and accept the truth statements of the organization.65

The result of this devotion to organizational goals and truths is an instrumentalizationof morality in relation to organizational goals and a disregard for the moral substance of

60. Tom Peters,Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties

(New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice

of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1994), and Michael Hammer and James

Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York:

HarperBusiness, 1993) are classic examples of the post-bureaucratic discourse.

61. Paul du Gay,In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics (London: Sage, 2000),

pp. 34.

62. Zygmunt Bauman,Modernity and the Holocaust(Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), p. 26.

63. Ibid, at 102.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., at 90.



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the goals themselves. For Bauman, morality within bureaucracies is not about self-respect,

integrity, empathy, autonomy, conscience, or individual responsibility, but instead self-

sacrifice, obedience, duty, discipline, and docility.66 In other words, bureaucratic moral

virtues de-emphasize the moral quality of an act and emphasize the technique of the act.The question for the bureaucrat is not whether the act is morally appropriate, but whether

it is in conformity with specific rules laid down by organizational authorities. Being

moral in this context means being obedient and rule-abiding. Bureaucrats become Philip

K. Dicks androids.

In his Postmodern Ethics, Bauman provides both a further critique of bureaucratic

morality and an alternative to it. He suggests that the technocratic morality of manage-

rial ideology alienates us from our moral nature by providing a rule-governed ethics that

manipulates the individual moral impulse.67 This ideology teaches us that morality does

not come from the inside, but is a matter of collective rationality. An action cannot be

moral if it is not based on a collective moral rule. Morality is a process of conforming

oneself to the rules laid down by moral experts within ones community, namely those

of higher rank within the organization. The reason why individual morality must be

discouraged within bureaucracies is because the individual moral impulse is a source of

autonomous behavior and poses the potential for subversion of authority; therefore, it is

not very welcome in organizations.68

To neutralize the moral nature of its members, bureaucracies employ three strategies.

The first is the denial of proximity. Since proximity is the space of intimacy and morality,

those who are affected by bureaucratic operation can become faces gazing back at one

and prompting a moral impulse. Conversely, proximity can also be a space of hatredand immorality.69 The organization operates to create a distance between itself and

those who are the objects of its actions. Law is the most common technique for produc-

ing this distancing; those negatively affected by the organization may resort to the law

or rules, but as long as organizational members have followed the rules, they are not

morally responsible, even if they are found legally responsible. One must appeal to the

law, not to conscience. In addition to law and rules, moral distancing is accomplished

by an appeal to complexity. What the organization does is so complicated and involves

such an intricate chain of actors, individual members are only a small part of the action

and cannot be wholly responsible.The second strategy of managing the moral impulse is effacement of face.70 This

involves denying the other the status of moral subject who can demand a moral response.

The other is not worthy of moral consideration because he or she is not a moral person.

The result is a dehumanization of that category of person. Baumans example is the treat-

ment of Jews and others during the Holocaust where slander and propaganda constructed

these people as amoral objects of contempt.71 Finally, the third strategy of moral control

66. Ibid., at 160.

67. Zygmunt Bauman,Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 124.68. Ibid., at 125.

69. Ibid., at 83.

70. Ibid., at 127.

71. Issues of face and its effacement and their relationship to morality are a significant trope

within the novel and could ground an essay in their own right, particularly situated in relation



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is reduction to traits.72 The object of action is disassembled into traits that bear no

moral quality. For example, customers are not whole persons, but a set of specific,

statistically determined traits not worthy of moral considerationa collection of needs

and demands.Through these three strategies, organizations create a social space in which rational

calculation, rather than non-rational moral impulse, determines action.73 These strategies,

combined with processes of command and coercion, liberate employees from moral

considerations. Informing someone that they must abide by the rules or face disciplinary

action incapacitates that persons moral instinct and makes it predictable, directing it in a

way assumed to be in the interests of the organization as a whole.

Certainly, there are characters inBenightedwho fit Baumans description of bureau-

cratic subjectivity. Lolas boss, Hugo, is someone who follows the bureaucratic ethos in

a way that seems distant and morally detached. Lola describes him by stating, I meet

his eyes, gaze to expressionless gaze. He was right all along. If you stay dead on the

surface, you dont get pitied, you dont get pried into, nobody presumes on you with

their judgments. A blank face gives you privacy.74 However, Lola herself, and many

of her workmates, are far from emotionless drones formalistically applying laws and

bureaucratic rules. For example, she has an alcoholic client, Jerry, a repeat offender, who

has been charged once again with loitering. However, rather than simply applying the

law to imprison him, she looks for a way to help him to avoid prosecution and receive

rehabilitation. While talking to a less-experienced social worker about Jerry, she says:

What we want is an exhausted [judge] who cant be bothered to follow through with the law.

Its one of those laws that a lot of us would ignore if we could. I mean, not every case, theres

a lot of people cause us a lot of trouble loitering, but the screw-ups like Jerry the law isnt

going to help at all. Its just a rule weve got to do something with if someone breaks it. We

just need a judge who cant face following through with the whole business.75

Lolas reaction to Jerry paints a picture of a bureaucratic functionary who does not

exactly fit the image painted by Bauman. She will not simply apply technocratic

morality to a situation, but is quite capable of moral autonomy while carrying out her

professional duties, in a way that does not challenge the authority of the institution andits management.

Given Lolas law enforcement duties, she is unable to completely distance herself

from the prowlers and other lunes who are the objects of her work. She is subject to the

moral imperatives that proximity demands of her. These imperatives can take the form of

pity, a desire to help, or anger and hatred. When Marty, Lolas trainee, is injured by a

prowler named Seligmann, Lola strikes Seligmann several times during an interrogation,

fueled by his taunting and unrepentant attitude. A lifetime of taunting at the hands of lyco

to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. We were only able to deal with them to some extent in thispiece given our other objectives.


73. Ibid.





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bullies wells up inside of her and she compromises her professional ethics, the bureau-

cratic rules, and the law by beating him. However, despite her attempts to reduce him to

a set of traits in her mind, she is unable to do so, showing that she is still capable of

autonomous moral consciousness. She is unable to efface his face, however much shedespises it.

Seligmann looks at me again. My hand is raised, and I cant hit him. I cant. I have to do

something with my hand, so I place it on his head to turn his face toward me. My fingers twitch

at the texture of his greasy hair. I can feel the heat of his scalp through it. All I can see is a

human being that Im hurting.76

Lola is remarkable in this sense. Despite growing up as a member of a despised minority,

living a life of abuse and discrimination, and working in a traumatizing environment

punctuated by terrifying violence, she does not give in to her damaged psyche to act in a

purely unethical way. She lives within the space between law and morality as defined by

Georgio Agamben in his study of how we remember Auschwitz.77 Agamben questions

the use of law in addressing the extreme situation of Auschwitz because a legal ruling,

such as that of the Nuremberg Trials, creates the sense that the problem has been over-

come. However, he argues, the problem is so enormous that it places the very idea of law

into question and confuses law with morality and ethics.

Auschwitz shows that we have a problem distinguishing between law and morality in

our society and when considering the moral wrongness of such an event, people tend to

think in terms of responsibility and guilt. These are legal categories, not ethical ones;ethics is about how to live a happy life and does not recognize guilt or responsibility as

categories. The ethical duty in an extreme situation such as the one Lola faces is to retain

ones humanity and to attempt to survive with dignity and respect. This may be impos-

sible in a concentration camp, as either guard or inmate, but perhaps it is possible in the

bureaucracy, contrary to Baumans view. This is Lolas difficult struggle.

Lolas fellow interrogator, Nate, has no such difficulty. He is able to distance himself

from the object of his work, proceeding to beat Seligmann further and feeling frustrated

and annoyed that it is not intimidating the victim. For him, Seligmann is just another

undistinguished prowler with no specific face. The technology of the act of interrogationtakes precedence over its moral quality. His actions fall within the collective norms of his

work group, which may not entirely match the bureaucratic rules. This seems particularly

true of law enforcement organizations as demonstrated by Lolas former trainer, Bride,

who reminds Lola, You cant trust them [prowlers] an inch, Lo, you know that. Balls to

what the law says.78

Bride is referring to theKendall Statute, which makes it illegal for citizens to resist

detainment more than would be expected of a reasonable person who is luninga mon-

strous twist on the standard of the reasonable man instantly rendering the monster

reasonable and the official monstrous. Lola notes, [i]ts one of the vaguest laws on the


77. Georgio Agamben,Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone

Books, 2002).




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books.79 DORLA catchers, knowing the risks they face, encourage each other to sub-

Kendall. Sub-Kendalling means tranking a fighter, then pleading the Kendall Statute

whether it was life or death or not. Word against word, yours against the lyco who is

waking up with a trank hangover. Its a pretty fine distinction. If you stop to read the rulebook, you arent around to plead the law next morning.80 In such a context, then we see

that the rules become flexible. Although it is not entirely within the spirit of the Kendall

Statute, sub-Kendalling has become a working norm in DORLAa part of its organiza-

tional culture and informal ethical code. This code is an attempt to find a balance between

personal survival and following the laws that produce some sort of orderthe same ethical

dilemma faced by everyone on a day-to-day basis.

Lolas character poses a challenge to Baumans claims, showing a more complex, and

more realistic portrayal of the sorts of dilemmas faced by people working in bureaucratic

organizations. At a theoretical level, du Gay also challenges Baumans claims, arguing

that they are based on a misinterpretation of Weber.81 He points out that

in this reading then, Webers central theme is assumed to be the increasing instrumental

rationalization of all spheres of human conduct, the crucial role played by bureaucracy in this,

and the ethical and emotional disfigurements this produces Similarly, bureaucrats are

rendered inhuman through their representation as specialists without soul and automata of the

paragraphs.82

Du Gay argues, instead, that upon a closer reading, Weber does not treat the impersonal,

expert, procedural and hierarchical character of bureaucratic reason and action as unethi-cal or morally bankrupt.83 Instead, it comprises an ethosa set of purposes and ideals

within a code of conduct and a means of conducting oneself within a particular life-order.

In other words, the bureau, as with other social domains, must be morally and ethically

assessed in its own right and not according to some universal standard. Weber believed

that modern, highly differentiated societies are comprised of many discrete ethical

domains and these neither represent different versions of a single homogeneous good nor

fall into any natural hierarchy.84 He goes on to suggest that we inhabit different orders

of life, that each is subject to different laws, and that the different value systems of the

world are in inevitable conflict with each other.85

The office produces the bureaucrat witha vocation, a commitment to participation in a distinct sphere of life which provides the

individual with a distinctive ethical bearing and mode of conduct.86

What are the moral attributes of the bureaucratic ethos? Du Gay suggests that the very

attributes that Bauman views as amoral define the bureaucrat as a moral figure.




82. Ibid.83. Ibid.

84. Ibid., at 45.

85. Max Weber, Science as a Vocation in Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins,

eds.,Max Webers Science as a Vocation(London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 22.

86. Weber in du Gay, Supra, note 61, at 75.



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Continuing to draw upon Weber, du Gay refuses to accept that there is a unified moral

personality that underpins human action. Different spheres of existence or life orders

within modern society do not constitute the anomic fragments of a lost totality. There are

many discrete ethical domains, not fragments of a single homogeneous good. Within abureaucracy, attributes such as strict adherence to procedure, acceptance of hierarchical

sub- and superordination, denial of personal moral enthusiasms, commitment to the

purposes of the office, are all ethical and moral practices in that domain. They lead to

administrative decision-making that is not arbitrary, nor motivated by personal aims.87

Within a liberal democracy, the dedication of bureaucrats to the rules and procedures of

the organization allow for administration that is relatively free of corruption.

Yet if we accept du Gays (and Webers) argument that bureaucracy is not necessarily

unethical in its very nature, but rather that it is monstrousconstituting its own distinct

realm of ethical practice, according to its own norms and values, and producing its own

forms of ethical subjectivity, it nonetheless remains difficult to reconcile this with

practices such as DORLAs systematized torture of accused citizens. At one point in the

novel, after mulling over the ways in which she has crossed her own moral lines, Lola

locates herself in historical continuity with the agents of the Inquisition.

Ive been lying. If I ever said they about the Inquisitors, I was lying. The word I needed was

we. Because we were part of it, down to the last man. We change our names, we change our

methods, but this is my history. Four hundred years ago, I would have been a hooded Inquisitor,

and I can think of nothing that excuses me now.88

Lola is not accepting the moral relativity of her institution and the norms that have devel-

oped within it. For her, there are some universal ethical standards that cannot be obscured

by bureaucratic procedures, rules, and laws. The us versus them ethos of DORLA

would seemingly then be unable to ground an ethical institution. One explanation that

preserves the bureau as a site not, by definition, antithetical to ethics, is that DORLA is

a corrupt bureaucracy.

Indeed, Lola considers that very possibility, eventually describing her vocation as a

vast network of cripples taking criminals and ordinary citizens by the heels, of prisons and

interrogations and acres and acres of paperwork obscuring what we do.89 Bauman wouldagree. And yet, it is not quite so simple; the monster is hopeful because Lola doesnt stop

there. She continues: [a]nd we tried to save people too, we didnt want killers laying

waste around us, and that was real, unarguable, even to an atheist, and its still around us.

How can we be so corrupt, and still try to fight the wickedness of the world? 90

Here we see the dilemma that the novel takes on: the conduct of the bureau in a state

of exception to borrow from Agamben. In his 2005 book, State of Exception, he argues

that in times of crisis, a government may begin to exceed the legal bounds within which

87. Ibid., at 5.






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its power normally operates.91 Citizenship and individual rights are normally dimin-

ished in this situation. For Agamben, Nazi Germany exhibited an extreme end point of

the state of exception, initiating a civil war allowing for the elimination of political

rivals and entire categories of citizens who could not be fitted into the political system.

92

A state of exception allows a government to operate outside of the law and this situation

can be prolonged indefinitely as certain categories of citizens continue to have their civil

rights revoked, often in the name of security. Agamben and others have characterized

the current American regime as operating in a state of exception since 9/11, removing

the legal status of POW from captured Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, for example.

Agamben warned against a generalization of the state of exception in the United States

through new institutions such as Homeland Security which combines the Secret Service,

Border Patrol, Immigration, Customs, and eighteen other law enforcement and emergency

response agencies into one massive security system, and provisions such as the USA

Patriot Actwhich allow the President discretionary power to declare martial law and

other emergency powers as well as enhanced surveillance powers over citizens private

communications.93 He cautions that there is an increasing tendency of governments,

not only in the United States, to rule by decreethrough executive directives, secrecy,

and public relations campaigns, rather than through the more cumbersome system of

parliaments and courts.94

The situation inBenightedis different in origin, but also produces a crisis situation

that is ripe for a state of exception. The moral flexibility of the bureaucracy as hopeful

monster does not sit well in a time of crisis when people are looking for unambiguous

answers and order. Society faces an intractable problem in luning, a natural and regularlyrecurring breakdown of reason, legal norms, social control, and civil order. Luning

elevates the stakes to the risk of a fall into the state of nature governed by passions and

nature rather than reason and law. The old laws for dealing with moon nights are

inadequate and DORLA, a powerful security organization designed to deal with the

problem, seems outdated and is not working very well. Contributing to this, DORLA is

staffed by a despised minority that receives little public sympathy or support. By the

end of the novel, Lola learns that there is a government conspiracy in place to produce

more nons in order to ensure that the security apparatus stays stronga secret plot that

would not receive public support, but is deemed necessary, somewhat ironically, by aruling elite (of Lunes). Lola breaks solidarity with her persecuted group finding the

project abhorrent in its reproduction of a despised subclass, a status she would wish on

no child. These factors form the shifting political context within which the bureaucratic

apparatus of DORLA must function, always alongside the contradiction that although

they are charged with preserving order and saving lives and property, DORLA officers

are a despised caste.

91. Georgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

92. Ibid., at 2.93. Georgio Agamben, Non au tatouage biopolitique,Le Monde , January 4, 2004, www.lemonde.

fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type-item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_

id=834932.




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Lola notes the difficult position in which this ongoing state of exception places the

bureau and the untenability of the bureaucrats vocation: [b]ut I guess its all come

through now, more paperwork, more examinations, more promises to the public that we

are their servants. If they tear our flesh from our bones, we wont presume to bleed onthem.95 In this way,Benighteds consideration of bureaucracy suggests that Baumans

view is too quick to moralize, overlooks the benefits of rational-legal authority, and is

ultimately ahistorical. On the other hand, du Gay demonstrates his own ahistoricism in

positing the bureaucratic form as an ethos of relatively unchanging values that necessarily

contribute to democracy.Benightedsuggests, we argue, that the bureau, at least in a state

of exception, faces challenges and contradictions that require of its agents a continual

negotiation of the bureaucratic ethos. This negotiation should not be easily written off

as bureaucratic corruption because it does not involve a complete abandonment of the

values of the bureau, of the rules guiding behavior, or of the practices of the vocation.

Lola, as hopeful monster, demonstrates throughout the novel that she is unwilling to

abandon the rules altogether. This is apparent in her attempts to help the repeat loiterer

Jerry by following formal procedures but in such a way that it will produce a just outcome

for him. When Jerrys social worker asks why Lola does not simply ignore the rules, she

replies, you dont get to come in here and question my career.96 Thus we see that

Lolas professional identity, her work, DORLAs legitimacy, turn on adhering to rules,

even when the rules do not entirely make sense. Much of the tension in the novel is generated

by Lola trying to come to terms with her own sense of herself as a good DORLA operative

and a good person, and yet bending and breaking certain rules. She knows, however, if

she abandons the rules altogether, she will be lost.This seems a very real prospect towards the end of the novel when the medical plot is

revealed and it is apparent that both Seligmann and Dr. Parkinson are murderers. Lola

decides to take matters into her own hands. She goes to the location where she knows that

Seligmann is being hidden by Parkinson and shoots Seligmann in the leg with a silver

bullet. She has shattered her bureaucratic demeanor and abandoned the rules. However, it

is not so simp

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It Won't Always Be Wrong': Morality and Monsters in Legal Rational Authority